


now and at the hour of our death

by republica



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Character Death, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-16
Updated: 2015-04-16
Packaged: 2018-03-23 07:09:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,031
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3759079
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/republica/pseuds/republica
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After everything, it’s a regular thug that does it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	now and at the hour of our death

After everything, it’s a regular thug that does it. One regular thug after about five others he’s already put down, their pulses slow and steadily unconscious. But five on one in a dead end alley, his back against the wall, he takes a few hits. A lot of hits, his head snapping to the side, the muscles in his side exploding as each lands. The final one has a knife, and if he’d had anyone to tell, he would’ve been angry that he survived a ninja with a spinning flail, ripping apart his skin and tearing him apart, only to be beaten by a guy with a switchblade who moves just a little too fast. If only he’d waited for Melvin...

The knife slams into his shoulder, twists, he lets out a garbled shout of pain and anger and tries to bring his other arm up to slam the guy in the head. His senses are thrown off by the rain, the buzzing in his head from too many punches, blood loss. He’s unable to stop himself falling to one knee, putting his arms up as the guy comes in again. He blocks one blow only to miss the next and he can feel the blade scrape on his rib cage, he can hear the contact. It’s the wrong side for his heart, but it doesn’t matter. The guy grabs him by the arm, the injured one, wrenches it behind his back, and he sees stars at the edge of his vision as pain swarms him.

He’s lifted, slightly, and thrown against the wall, teeth rattling, and then there’s one more icy hot jolt of pain in his abdomen before he falls to the ground. He can hear a weird moaning sound and it must be coming from him because the guy is gone, he’s running out of the alley.

He has to move, somehow, before the other guys he knocked out wake up. There’s a dumpster to his left, and he slowly, painfully manages to inch his way over to it using his good arm, the other curled under him, blood pooling inside his costume and he can smell the coppery scent, taste it in his mouth and feel it on his body.

The trouble is lifting himself, one armed, his stomach muscles torn, up to the dumpster and from there to a fire escape. If he can just get to a roof... any roof. Maybe... Claire...

Sheer force of will gets him onto the escape, but he has to stop, to lie on the cold wet metal, each breath bringing new pain, head still ringing. His good arm pulls the phone from a pocket, dials the only number in it, holds it weakly to his ear as he gasps agony into the now quiet night air.

“Matt?”

He can’t answer for a minute, his head is so light and yet so heavy.

“I’m...” he manages to wheeze out, his voice weak. “I’m sorry...”

“Matt? Where are you, Matt? What happened?” There’s a familiar note of panic in her voice now, he remembers it from the basement, and he dimly thinks how much worse this will be after that.

“Make sure... they don’t find out...” He gasps, and he shifts slightly and groans audibly as it twists somewhere internally. “They can’t...”

“Oh, god, no,” Claire whispers, “Don’t you dare, Matt. I’ll - I’ll find you, tell me where you are, please.”

“Alley,” is all he can say, “he had a knife...”

The phone slips from his hand and crashes to the cement 10 feet below.

He lies there, anguished brain attempting to keep processing everything, but slowly the sounds start to fade, everything starts to fade, everything is so quiet, he can’t ... see... anything.

 

“Matt? Hello? Say something, you asshole,” Claire whispers into the phone clutched tightly in her hand. She’s still in bed, the room is completely dark except for the window, and she realizes she’s crying.

He’ll be fine, she tries to tell herself. First time she met him he’d been worse off than many patients she’d lost and he’d lived fine. He was tough. Good at taking a beating.

But for some reason those thoughts don’t comfort her at all. She doesn’t know what to do. How can she find him, help him, when she has no idea where he is.

Well, if he... when he makes it back to his place, she can be waiting for him. The thought energizes her, and she rolls out of bed, pulling on pants and a sweatshirt and a raincoat, gathering the bad of supplies she’s kept ready since their second meeting by her bed.

When she gets there the door is locked. She can’t hear anything inside but that doesn’t mean anything one way or another. The roof, then, she decides and heads up the stairs. Her heart is pounding fast again, and as she bursts out onto the rooftop she bites hard enough on the inside of her cheek that it bleeds. The rooftop door is locked too.

“Shit!” She yells, kicking at it and reeling back. It’s almost dawn, there’s a tiny sliver of sun peeking up through the dense clouds.

An alley, he’d said an alley...

To find him she has to think like him, right? He’d been trying to get back here, he uses the rooftops... maybe...

Her legs jars funnily as she jumps down from his rooftop to the next one over, her eyes scanning. From there she has to climb down a fire escape and up the next one over a large gap between buildings.

It takes her an hour of climbing up, down, jumping across, but on a rooftop about five or six blocks away from his apartment she sees, as she makes her way up yet another metal ladder, a dark shape huddled next to an old access door. Her heart catches in her chest despite her heavy breathing, and she half runs, half stumbles over to it. It’s fully dawn now and in the morning light she stares, horrified, at the blood, puddles of it marking the way he came. His face is slack, he’s lying half on his side, and she drops to her knees. A Spanish prayer slips from her mouth as she brings a hand up to his face.

A cold, sick feeling wells up as she moves to his neck and feels nothing. She holds her hand there for a minute, two, three, but nothing changes.

He’s not... cold, yet, her mind registers numbly. It can’t have been too long ago.

If only she’d been faster.

Her hand reaches out, pulls his head into her lap, and she eases the masked helmet off. His eyes are open, staring into nothing, and the sight of his face makes her shoulders shake. With two fingers she closes them, and then she runs a finger down, over his cheeks covered with blood, over his lips and she remembers that one, wonderful moment in the kitchen of his apartment.

She’s reaching for the phone to dial 911 before she remembers, abruptly, what he’d said to her. Make sure they don’t know.

His friend, the other lawyer, he knows. But apart from them...

The tears come faster as she lays his head down gently and surveys the armor. He’s got some kind of underclothes on, almost like pajamas. If she hides the armor, if she helps him... one last time...

It’s tough, pulling the red material off him, and she has to stop once or twice to cry hysterically. But she does it, and the stuff isn’t that heavy. She can see where it’s deflected blades and she can see, clearly, where it hasn’t.

“But what if it did slow you down,” she whispers as she tucks the blood soaked bundle into her medical bag.

She reaches again for his hand, strips off the glove, and entwines their fingers. Tears drip from her face onto their skin.

There’s a 911 operator’s voice in her ear, and she says something to him but she doesn’t know what, and however many minutes later there are sirens in the distance. She doesn’t know how much time passes but as they pick him up and place him on the stretcher she feels herself gasp, choke and scream out incoherently. An EMT holds her back as they take him away, and she has to - she has to go after them, to be with him, he can’t be - alone. Bloody and alone, like she’d said.

 

“Matt? Damnit, Matt, it’s 7 in the morning, I’ll see you in two hours at the office,” Foggy says into his phone. Light from the window hits him in the eye as he sits up, and he makes a face.

There’s nothing from the other end.

“I know you can’t have misdialed, buddy, so out with it,” he continues.

“..F-Foggy?” It’s a woman’s voice. “This is Claire.” She sounds  exhausted, her voice is a croak and there’s something ... wrong.

“Claire? The hot nurse? I mean - is Matt okay?”

“N-no,” she whispers. “I’m - I went with him to the hospital.” Her voice cracks on the last word, but she draws a ragged breath. “Now I’m - at his place. I found your number.”

“The hospital?” He says blankly. “Something must be really wrong if he let you...” There’s cold water pouring into his chest as he hears her sob once.

“He...” she says, almost too softly to hear. “didn’t...”

“No,” Foggy whispers, and she doesn’t go on, she’s just crying into the phone and he listens dully. “I’m... I’ll come over, stay there,” he says. It has to be some kind of mistake, he thinks. He’s at the hospital because... because he finally realized dressing up as a devil and kicking the shit out of people was one hundred percent proof of mental instability.

He feels almost drunk as he climbs the stairs to Matt’s apartment. The door is unlocked and he opens it almost hesitantly.

She’s sitting with her back to him, staring down at something on the ground, and she doesn’t turn when he comes in.

Over her shoulder he sees what it is and his knees weaken. He has to put a hand out to steady himself on the back of her chair. She’s spread out the red costume on the table, and he can see it’s encrusted with dried blood.

“He called me,” she says, not turning or taking her eyes off the table. “Said... to make sure no one found out. I didn’t get there in time.”

The vice around his heart clamps a little bit. She’d gotten to speak to him. He sits on the couch perpendicular, not looking at the table.

“What happened?” he asks. She raises her head and he sees the dried tear tracks on her face and her expression.

“I don’t know. I got the call, he was clearly bad... couldn’t tell me anything. I guess he... kept trying, kept fighting, because when I came here I found... him... on a roof a couple blocks away... He was trying to come back to us...”

“Jesus christ,” Foggy says, “Fucking stubborn bastard.”

He puts his head in his hands to stop the moisture gathering there from leaking out but it does no good.

When they lead him into the morgue at the hospital he feels bile rising in his throat and as they lead him over to a crisp white shroud he stares down at what used to be his best friend, but now looks so starkly white and red and empty that he doesn’t know what it is. He stares down, eyes wide. His hand jumps like he wants to touch, but he can’t.

The second call to a funeral home he’s made, and it’s so much more than he can handle. Karen’s been crying since the moment she stepped into the office, where they’d congregated, although there’s no work, he doubts there will be again in these rooms, but it’s their place, the three of them, and he thinks back to their triumph after Fisk had been put away. God, he’d been so stupid, how could he have let Matt keep doing this. He could’ve done something, forced him to stop, kept his friend alive somehow. Instead, Karen makes small wet noises and he stands by the window while a woman murmurs in his ear.

There’s no one to make the decisions but him, and he can’t bear that weight, he doesn’t know what to do. Claire comes to Matt’s apartment again, and they go through his things quietly. The box with his father’s gear he puts to the side. It, and the blood stained remains of the armor, he decides, are for Matt only; his secret should go with him to the grave. He finds himself staring for long stretches out at the city, finds himself crying and he feels rage, at himself but also at Matt, for leaving him. He hadn’t been alone since that day in the dorm, they’d been by each other’s side for years. The fight after he’d found out had been the longest he’d gone without speaking to Matt in 8 years, and now… he’d never say anything to him again. Never make him laugh or even make him angry. Just nothing.

 

Karen’s gone to too many funerals. Elena, Ben, and now… Matt. One by one her connections, the things she’s built, they’re disappearing, slipping from her grasp. Foggy barely speaks to anyone, even to her, and his face is drawn and pinched with grief the few times she’s seen him since that phone call. She hopes this is secretly a dream, that she’s fallen asleep at the desk and her brain has fooled her into thinking that her friend is gone forever, but she’ll wake up when Matt opens the door to the office and somehow he’ll know she was just dozing even though she greets him as alertly as ever. He’ll laugh and smirk a little and she’ll make him coffee and it will be like it was. She isn’t wearing another black dress, sitting in a pew of Matt’s church where the priest, who clearly knew Matt well, is giving a somber eulogy. He talks about a side of Matt Karen can’t identify with, a man clearly more conflicted than she’d realized and she wonders, did she really know him at all? Is it too presumptuous to think she’d been his friend, after only a few months?

The church isn’t very full; Matt had no family left, which had made Karen cry a bit harder when she’d heard, but Foggy’s mother is there, as are a couple cops from the 15th, a regal black woman in a large hat, some suits from Landman & Zack, including Marci, who looks like she’s displaying a real emotion for once. Some of their former clients turn up, too, and a woman that Karen’s never seen, who sits in the back of the church and gazes with empty eyes at the coffin on the altar.

It starts to rain as they get to the cemetery, and Karen pulls her coat around her tighter. Only a couple people join them there, including the woman, who stands next to Foggy as they lower Matt into the ground. She’s holding a small black box and she glances at Foggy once, and he nods, tightly, so she walks forward and lays the box on the coffin, and Karen wonders about these other people that knew Matt.

She finds it hard to leave, after its over. In the end, it’s her, Foggy and the woman, and they are all silent. Wind whips at their hair and their coats and she reaches out to find Foggy’s hand.

She starts going to church. She sits in the back of Matt’s church, wondering if she can find anything of what he found from the words of the priest. She never stays after for the socials.

One Sunday, a person slides into the pew next to her, and it’s her, the woman from the funeral. Karen had asked Foggy, after, if she was someone from Matt’s past, and he’d given her a sad look and said she could’ve been someone in his future. Claire.

She wants to say something to her, but it makes her chest ache too much so they sit beside each other and listen to the sermon and it’s nice. She doesn’t see her again after that, and when she asks Foggy, he says she moved away.

There’s no point in continuing to rent the office. Foggy shows up to gather Matt’s things, and tells her that they have one week to clear everything away. She tries to talk to him, to comfort him or anything, but he seems like a robot, almost.

She reads in the paper, speculatory articles about where the Daredevil of Hell’s Kitchen might have gone to, and she feels a jolt inside that leaves her motionless. Foggy admits it easily enough, wearily explaining to her, but she can’t bring herself to yell at his tired expression, and so she leaves, the door clunking behind her, and she doesn’t get up from her bed for two days.

They talk less, not for a lack of trying, but it’s like there’s no point in saying words. Foggy gets a job, the same firm Marci’s at, and Karen decides that maybe, running away to New York wasn’t such a good idea after all. Or, maybe running was the best idea she’d ever had. She’s on a Greyhound two days later, and she calls Foggy from her seat as they rumble over the bridge, and when he doesn’t answer she isn’t surprised. She just tells him goodbye, and thanks him, and tells him she’ll never forget him or Matt, she never could.

 

In a year, neatly trimmed grass has grown to cover the earth she remembers as brown, and the grey headstone is not as stark, it’s been worn down a little, and as Claire approaches, she sees two familiar heads standing in front of the grave, one brown and one bright red, and she smiles, a little, as she walks up to join them.

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> well, i can't explain this


End file.
